ROB WOUTAT | Does Bainbridge live up to its stereotype?

Soon after my wife and I moved to Kitsap County 25 years ago — the part of Kitsap County that is not Bainbridge Island — we began picking up reports about the Islanders, and the reports were unflattering.

They're snobs, people told us. Overprivileged professionals. They drive Audis and BMWs and Mercedes. They think they're better than everybody else. They're embarrassed to be part of Kitsap; they want to secede and form a county of their own. The Island's children, like those in Lake Wobegon, are all above average.

I'd heard this kind of thing before — when I lived in Minnesota's Twin Cities. There, it was Edina and North Oaks where all the snooty, overprivileged professionals lived. In King County, I'm told, they all live in Bellevue.

Oh come now, I thought. How can you generalize that way about a whole community? A community of more than 20,000 people. I suspected that what I was hearing was plain, old-fashioned class envy.

And it's easy to suspect that when you learn that the median price of Bainbridge homes is well above half a million dollars and the average is more than $800,000, that the median income for a family is over a $100K, that 56 percent of the adults are classified as managerial/professional, that students score high on standardized tests, and that 78 percent of them go to four-year colleges.

If class envy is behind some of the resentment we hear about Bainbridge Islanders, some of that envy expresses itself in the perverse pleasure other Kitsap residents take in hearing of the island's troubles: the problems in the police department, for example, with the hiring of unqualified officers, the accusation that an officer stalked a member of the city council, and the controversial police shooting and killing of a mentally ill Bainbridge man.

Some Kitsap residents find pleasurable entertainment in reading about the strife in the Bainbridge city government: the persistent bickering at city council meetings which once turned into a fistfight between two attendees; the backroom efforts of some council members to hire a lawyer without the council's approval as part of an effort to get rid of the city manager; a council member's using his personal blog to write about council business; the city's former civil service examiner requesting a state investigation into alleged misconduct by the city manager and a member of the city council; the move by one council member to conceal ethics violations until required to reveal them by a public records request. And so on.

Before moving to Kitsap, I worked for 23 years at a private, college preparatory school where many of my students were children of the rich. When I started there, every graduate in the school's long history had gone to college, more than half of them to Yale.

As a faculty member, I expected to be treated as one of the help by the Weyerhaeusers and other families of like renown, but I was relieved to learn how wrong I was, to see that even the wealthiest treated the faculty with respect. Some of them became my friends and offered me the use of their vacation homes. So when I moved to Kitsap I hadn't developed an antipathy toward the rich.

But then I began hearing anecdotes. My wife ran into a distant relative, a Bainbridge resident, who asked how my wife liked Bremerton. "I love it," my wife replied. The Islander was incredulous. "You do?" she said, as if to say, "You're not as smart as I thought you were."

An Islander went to an arts event in Bremerton where he found an egalitarian, congenial group of people who shared an interest in the art and in the artist. On Bainbridge, he said, where you have a high concentration of competitive professionals, you don't find that cordiality.

An Island friend of mine told another Islander he was going to Bremerton. The other Islander was baffled. "What the hell would you do there?" he asked.

A Kitsap woman not from Bainbridge went to a political fundraiser on the Island, assuming fellow party members would welcome her. They didn't.

When anyone has suggested another bridge from Central Kitsap to the Island, Islanders have beaten it down.

There's clearly a stereotype here, and stereotypes can be cruel and unfair. But stereotypes don't materialize out of thin air — and they persist as long as some people work hard to live up to them.